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What's a Wiki? Wiki is the Hawaiian word for quick, and Ward Cunningham - the inventor of the wiki - named his project after the wiki wiki shuttle. A backcronym that is probably equally apropos is WIKI stands for "What I Know Is..." MediaWiki is the free software (GPL) that runs Wikipedia under the auspices of the [http://www.wikimedia.org/ Wikimedia Foundation].

I'm Greg Rundlett [http://iic.harvard.edu/people] [http://freephile.com] [http://rundlett.com], a free software advocate who lives in Newburyport, MA with my wife and two sons. [[Image:Thomas Jefferson rev.jpg|thumb|right|He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.]]What do I know about wikis in production? Well, back in 1999 when I was a web developer at RagingBull, we used a wiki system as a content creation and management backend to our website front-end. Starting in 2005, I used MediaWiki as the platform to organize operations, development and technology services at OASIS. Most recently, I've been deploying MediaWiki in my new role at the IIC at Harvard. I'm here to show you a lot share some of things about the wiki system called MediaWiki and hope that experience with you'll take away a lot from this presentation. The great thing about sharing knowledge; like sharing free software; is that you can take away as much as you possibly can and I may take away ... [http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Jefferson quoting Thomas Jefferson] ''He who receives an even greater knowledge than I started with just idea from our sharingme, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.''<ref>[http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12. Nobody has lesshtml Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson], everybody has more13 Aug. 1813.ME 13:333</ref>

== Using it - Why? ==IWikis are immensely popular and come in many flavors. It was late 2006 to early 2007 when 'wiki' reached it'm s zenith as a buzzword in the news.<ref>[http://www.google.com/trends?q=wiki Google Trends for keyword wiki]</ref> But wikis have not going faded into a detailed comparison of various wikis, trying to argue which is bestthe sunset like last years fashion. But I'll point out a few reasons why you should care about choose MediaWiki in case you don't knowas your wiki platform.

It's the most popular wiki software in the world; both in terms of hosting the largest single wiki Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page WikiPedia] as well as deployments by all sort of individuals, groups and corporations. In practical terms that means people you hire will know mediawikiMediaWiki.

=== Syntax ===I do want to point out that MediaWiki does not use <ref>CamelCase</ref> words in order to make a link. This means a lot to all the Irish people of the world, and also the marketers who seem pretty convinced of the coolness of McWords like ThinkPad, etc.

=== Editor Options ===; WYSIWYG editor :Wysiwyg Weird Yucky Stupid Interface Wrecks Sucky Interference With Your Goodness

==== WikEd ====

* Runs automatically on every MediaWiki installation when installed as a local [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/748 Greasemonkey ] user script

==== FCK Editor ====

note In 2007 it was announced that a WYSIWYG editor would be built for MediaWiki. Wikia (Jimmy Wales' for-profit venture) started work on it. It still isn't ready for prime time. Note that I had to patch a minor bug to get it to work and even then, it did funny things with my article (wanted to collapse a line-break between template tag and next line resulting in a space being inserted prior to the next line, resulting in preformatted text rendering for that line.

==== OpenOffice ====OpenOffice (since v. 2.3) has had a built-in "Export to MediaWiki" menu option. So, you can write an article in OpenOffice Writer (or StarOffice Writer) and export the file to wiki markup. This could be useful particularly if you want to convert large collections of Word documents. One drawback to "export" is that you would still have to copy and paste that output into the wiki. http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/wikipublisher is the extra hook that allows you to save your page in the wiki(essentially registering your user data in the instance of OpenOffice

* Use this http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/6372 greasemonkey Greasemonkey script to show any mediawiki page as a presentation

# Import/Export (TODO talk about exporting to text)

##<pre>[[Special:ListGroupRights]]</pre> # Image searchingGalleries like [[Special:NewImages]]# Protection(lock a page) Not to be confused with 'versions' that helps with things like versioned documentation for software products.

* Daniel J. Barrett wrote the [http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596519797/toc.html MediaWiki Book] published by O'Reilly ISBN 978-0596519797(no need for any special markup, ISBN numbers are automatically recognized by the parser. You can also visit [[Special:BookSources]])

* Documentation (remember user at Help: and admin at Manual:)